Kyrle Bellew

Harold Kyrle Money Bellew was born on 28 March 1850 in Prescot, Lancashire, England, the son of the Reverend John Chippendall Montesquieu Bellew and Eva Maria Bellew, née Money. His mother was the youngest daughter of Vice-Admiral Rowland Money and had been previously widowed when her first husband, Henry Edmund Michell Palmer, a soldier in the Indian Army, died of hill fever in Madras on 9 November 1846. His father, born John Chippendall Higgin, had adopted his mother's maiden name in 1844 while a student at St Mary Hall and was ordained an Anglican priest in 1848. The Reverend Bellew's own lineage was disputed by the Reverend Samuel Gambier, who believed him to be a natural son of the actor William Macready, with whom John Bellew bore a physical resemblance and maintained regular correspondence until 1850.

In November 1851, the family traveled to India, where John Bellew had been appointed assistant chaplain to St John's Cathedral in Calcutta. The marriage deteriorated after Kyrle's father discovered correspondence between his wife and Ashley Eden, a civil servant with the East India Company. A divorce was granted on 6 March 1855 on grounds of adultery, with John Bellew retaining custody of the children. The family returned to England and settled first in St John's Wood before moving to Hamilton Terrace, Marylebone in 1857, and later to Bedford Chapel in Bloomsbury, where they resided from 1862 to 1868. Kyrle's siblings included an older brother, Evelyn Montesquieu Gambier, born 25 October 1847, who emigrated to the United States and died childless on 1 December 1900; an older sister, Eva Sibyl Bellew, born October 1848, who eventually entered the Poor Clares convent in Kensington and died in 1927; and a younger sister, Ida Percy Clare, born 17 June 1852 in Calcutta, who married Joseph Boulderson and died in early 1902.

Bellew was educated at Lancaster Royal Grammar School and received instruction from private tutors, among them lessons in Latin alongside Leslie Ward. His home life was troubled by a difficult relationship with his stepmother and stepsister, Maud Wilkinson, experiences he later described in his posthumous work Short Stories. In the early 1860s he attempted to run away to the East India docks to pursue a life at sea. His father, though hoping Kyrle would enter the ministry, ultimately permitted a naval career, and in 1866 Bellew was sent to train aboard HMS Conway, a merchant marine training ship moored on the Mersey River, where he spent two years.

Before establishing himself as an actor, Bellew worked variously as a signwriter, gold prospector, and rancher, primarily in Australia, where he also acquired a substantial amount of property. By the mid-1880s he had become an actor of recognized standing. He toured extensively with the actress Cora Brown-Potter, known as Mrs. Brown-Potter, throughout the 1880s and 1890s, bringing Shakespearean and other classic productions from the United States to Australia. In 1888 he began giving acting lessons to Caroline Dudley, the socialite known as Mrs. Leslie Carter. The following year, Bellew was named as a co-respondent in the widely publicized divorce proceedings brought by Mr. Leslie Carter, who alleged that Bellew and other men had been involved with his wife.

Bellew's Broadway career spanned from 1886 to 1910. He starred in Valerie and appeared in productions including Charlotte, Brigadier Gerard, and Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, the last of which he helped introduce to American audiences. He also served as a book writer for the stage. In the final decade of his life, Bellew divided his time between his mining interests in Australia and his theatrical work in the United States. In 1905 he appeared in the silent film Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; or, Held for Ransom, a medium then considered beneath an actor of his reputation.

On 27 October 1873, Bellew had married the French stage actress Eugénie Marie Seraphié Le Grande at St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne, under the name Harold Dominick Bellew. The marriage lasted only a matter of weeks, and the couple did not live together again. Le Grande had traveled to Melbourne aboard the passenger ship Lincolnshire, departing London on 4 December 1872 in the company of the actor Boothroyd Fairclough, giving birth during the voyage on 15 January 1873. One account of the failed marriage holds that Le Grande had previously been Fairclough's mistress and returned to him after Fairclough discovered the couple on their honeymoon. In Short Stories, Bellew recounted a tale attributed to a friend named Jack that closely paralleled the circumstances of his own marriage, including the date and the presence of an illegitimate child. Bellew formally divorced Le Grande on 16 May 1888. His obituaries described him as unmarried and noted that he was survived by a sister, a nun with the Poor Clares in London. He left his entire estate, valued at $3,642, to his friend Frank A. Connor.

Bellew died of pneumonia on 2 November 1911 in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he had been appearing in a production called The Mollusc.